Today, an enterprise's survival in local or global markets at least partially depends on the knowledge and competencies of its employees, which may easily be considered a competitive factor for the enterprises (or other organizations). Shorter product life cycles and the speed with which the enterprise can react to changing market requirements are often important factors in competition and ones that underline the importance of being able to convey information on products and services to employees as swiftly as possible. Moreover, enterprise globalization and the resulting international competitive pressure are making rapid global knowledge transfer even more significant. Thus, enterprises are often faced with the challenge of lifelong learning to train a (perhaps globally) distributed workforce, update partners and suppliers about new products and developments, educate apprentices or new hires, or set up new markets. In other words, efficient and targeted learning is a challenge that learners, employees, and employers are equally faced with. But traditional classroom training typically ties up time and resources, takes employees away from their day-to-day tasks, and drives up expenses.
Electronic learning systems provide users with the ability to access course content directly from their computers, without the need for intermediaries such as teachers, tutors, and the like. Such systems have proven attractive for this reason (and perhaps others) and may include a master repository that stores existing versions of learning objects. Typically, each time a new version of an object is created, contained files are stored again even if the individual files have not changed. This often requires a large amount of storage required on the repository hardware and may also considerably slow down the storing of the objects.